Greg's comments
have clearly lit a fire under a number of developers, judging from the very
active and interesting discussion at his site.

I agree with Greg:
computer games as a cultural form are at a creative and economic standstill.
There are very little few games scheduled for release that excite me. I have
found myself playing a number of older games in the last couple of months, enjoying
a few of them, bored by the rest. Even visionaries like Raph Koster have been
ensnared in the industry's limitations like Gulliver pinned down by Lilliputians.

My main disagreement
with Greg's critique of the computer games industry is that he holds designers
accountable for a failure of imagination and their employers responsible for
a conservative business model that favors sequels and licensed properties. I
think these complaints are valid, but they don't go deep enough to the source
of the malaise. The more fundamental problems cannot be tackled simply by will
alone, and aren't simply the fault of designers. Nor is there any reason necessarily
that sequels or licensed games must suck.

Poking at those
deeper foundations, I see five very different problems. One is generic to all
"culture industries", while the other four are specific to computer
and video games.

Problem #1:
All cultural industries have a problem recognizing and recruiting creative talent.

This derives from
a pragmatic but ultimately short-sighted assessment of the cost-effectiveness
of seeking a wider variety of creators.

I sometimes get
phone calls from reporters who are trying to figure out why a particular television
show or movie was successful, trying to boil it down to a magic formula. Hobbits
+ wizards + Manichean morality = boffo box office! DiCaprio + a sinking ship
= mucho dinero! The same conversations are going on all the time inside Hollywood,
or the major networks-and in the game industry.

The problem is
that the only clear principle I can see behind the vast majority of gigantic
successes is that originality, distinctiveness, freshness and quality often
pay off big time. Not always, and sometimes what middlebrow cultural critics
describe as original isn't particularly when you take a step back from it, or
it is only original from the perspective of a jaded art-house crowd. Originality
is not the same thing as artiness or complexity. I didn't care for "Titanic"
but its combination of sentimentality, teenage love and big-budget special effects
was distinctive within the cultural marketplace, however hackneyed any of its
particular components might have been.

In the gaming marketplace,
this applies to Grand Theft Auto 3 or The Sims: the latter was
a revolutionary design, the former is a blue-chip implementation of a fairly
ordinary idea. Either way, that's what sells: The Sims because it is
different than any other game, GTA 3 because it has better gameplay than
99% of the games on the market. I don't especially enjoy whacking virtual people
over the head with a digitized baseball bat (well, ok, now and again) but
GTA 3 is such a good game in its design that it's worth playing regardless
of its theme.

Why don't cultural
industries generally act on this basic principle, and find new ways to recruit
the Peter Jacksons and Will Wrights instead of going back to the same old hacks
time and time again? Because there's two kinds of profit to be made: the big
boffo profit and the small but reliable profit stream that comes through making
lots of the same-old same-old. Searching for the fresh creative voice is like
putting your chips down on a single number of the roulette wheel: you're going
to lose a lot of chips chasing the big score. It makes a certain amount of sense
to put most of your chips on black or red.

The only way the
gaming industry, or any other cultural business, can bring in fresh talent is
to develop some new heuristic, some new feeder system, that pre-sorts the huge
array of aspirants creators into the quick and the damned. American Idol is
great fun to watch in its early stages, but if you were seriously embarking
on an effort to find new talent, it would be inordinately expensive and exhausting
to simply open yourself to the entire world.

Here is where we
start to get into problems that are more specific to the gaming industry of
the moment. Some creative businesses have reasonably good heuristics. You want
to get into acting? Wait tables in New York and appear in off-off-off Broadway
plays, and hope for the best. Pay your dues and struggle. You want to get into
poetry? Go to writers' workshops, write a lot of poems and submit them to small
literary magazines and hope someone takes notice.

This is where the
deep problems that are particular to game design come up.

Problem #2:
The sorting heuristics that the games industry uses to identify possible designers
are still the old "let the geek cream rise to the top", looking for
people who get out and teach themselves to program and work the machinery. It's
not working anymore for the gaming industry, because geeks mostly don't have
the creative vision to make it work.

Geeks usually can
only make games for geeks, games that reproduce the genres and forms that geeks
have played with before, that draw on the same two or three deep veins of popular
culture, the same patterned ur-experience of science fiction, Dungeons &
Dragons and cyberculture.

It's a closed feedback
loop, the output becomes the input. Gamers make games for gamers who make games
for gamers and thus it shall ever be. So more than most culture industries,
the games business desperately needs a new heuristic that brings entirely different
people to their collective doorstep, and NOT, NOT, NOT movie producers or TV
producers or the other dead weight and effluvia of other culture industries.

This raises, unfortunately,
the next problem.

Problem #3:
Some of the people who have the best understanding of computer and video games
as a form, and the deepest creative vision of how they might be improved, lack
the technical skills to do even the most elementary programming or visual work
on a real game.

Many gamers understand
far better than game designers what makes a good game. This is something of
a commonplace on bulletin boards where gamers congregate, and is sometimes expressed
with a certain amount of youthful bravado and stupidity. But if you sort the
signal from the noise (lots of it) on such boards, you'll often find a surprising
number of gamers who not only hone in on the structural and aesthetic shortcomings
of a particular game with deadly and rapid accuracy, but who suggest a variety
of quite reasonable and feasible improvements and changes to address those shortcomings.

For example, the
vast majority of changes made in the massively-multiplayer online game Dark
Age of Camelot in the last eight months or so were proposed by a number
of players (disclosure: including me) within two months after the game's launch.
The developers dragged their heels for almost a year before beginning to implement
these changes, some of which they initially mocked or dismissed when players
originally suggested them. The ostensible reason was that the developers wanted
to "collect data", but I think it is also that they simply did not
understand their own game as well as the people who played it. Everquest
has suffered even more dramatically from the same problem at times in its history.

Sometimes gamers'
ideas are for various reasons wildly impractical. Haemish, who has written a
long series on his vision of the perfect MMOG at Waterthread,
has some great ideas but at least a few of them strike me as difficult or impossible
to implement. Some gamers whine or carp or are hopelessly cynical about games.
And many gamers are geeks and limited in their vision in the same way as the
geeks who make the games.

Some aren't. Clustered
around the world of game design are a goodly number of middlebrow critics and
fringe designers who could meaningfully help to shape a richer, better vision
of what games are and games could be if only there was some way to incorporate
them into the process of design. The designer and artist Eric
Zimmerman is one great example of the possibilities, as are visionaries
like Raph Koster and Will Wright.
However, Zimmerman and Koster and Wright know how to program. They know what
the technology is and what it can do.

That is too great
a barrier for most of the people who have a good understanding of the form of
computer games and their untapped potential. Movie-making is a demanding technical
exercise, too, but there is a crucial place for someone who just has a good
idea and a lot of imagination: a screenwriter only needs to grasp the barest
bones of the process of film-making to craft a script worth producing. Until
game design has a similar niche, it almost cannot tap into richer, more generative,
more connected streams of creativity.

Games are old enough
to have produced a second generation of people who grew up with them, immersed
in a world of games. When this happened in the comics business, you had a massive
creative explosion fueled by writers and artists like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison,
Todd McFarlane, Scott McCloud, Kurt Busiek, Art Speigelman and many others.
When it happened in the movie business, you got Francis Ford Coppola and Martin
Scorcese and other directors of the late sixties and early seventies. The games
industry is stuck, because most of the people who understand what makes a better
game have no structural role to play in the process of game development.

Problem #4:
Games are expensive to make.

The question of
how game design actually works underscores yet another fundamental problem.

It is not merely
that the tools of game design are difficult to use, and therefore a barrier
to entry. It is also that games designed to run on current computers and consoles
simply cannot be created by one or two people on the cheap. In an era when the
costs of publishing writing have potentially dropped to near zero, and even
the costs of movie and television production, traditionally monstrous in size,
are dropping rapidly with digital technology, game design is moving rapidly
in the other direction, becoming more and more expensive in terms of the human
labor and tools that are required.

The more any given
game requires for its production, the less likely it is, for very good reasons,
that a developer is going to tolerate exotic experiments in its conceptual design
or in the process of producing the game. When you're paying a huge salary budget
on a given game, adding one or two or three more people who do not appear to
have a vital and direct role in the day-to-day production of the game is fiscally
irresponsible.

Problem #5:
The technology of gaming is highly unstable, and its instability leads to a
confusion between the tools and the task.

Game design is
hostage to Moore's Law, to the notion that always just beyond the horizon is
a technology which will magically solve basic design problems: better AI, richer
graphics, faster processors, the Internet 2. This is a will o' the wisp. Some
of these hopes are groundless: there is no point in hoping for the imminent
arrival of AI which is not simply a clever trick designed to convince a solo
player that he is playing someone other than himself. The only thing to hope
for is the aesthetic vision that will make that trick convincing, and that is
possible with current technology. Richer graphics themselves have little to
do with whether a game grabs and keeps the imagination, with whether immersion
happens or not.

Many designers
design for tomorrow's technology, and reach for technologies reflexively, even
when they create more problems than they solve.

Some suggestions
about the road ahead

The game industry
needs to invent new heuristics for recruiting designers and open up the process
of game design to new inputs. They have to actively start seeking ideas and
visions from a wider variety of people, and stop seeing skill in programming
as being the same thing as a creative idea of what a game is or should be. Games
need a wider variety of themes, a wider variety of narrative structures, and
a richer, deeper connection to popular culture as a whole.

This is where Greg
Costikyan's concerns about sequelitis and licensed properties kick in full force.
There's a reason why movies made about computer games suck, and it's because
computer games are already mostly a derivative cultural form, parasitically
deriving their themes and ideas from pop culture archetypes and tropes. Games
need to a place where new characters and stories come from, not just a place
for making old ones superficially interactive.

Another step forward
might be the further development of authoring tools. Neverwinter Nights
excited many players because of its promise in this regard, but in the end only
exhibited the cruel paradox of such tools. The more flexible and powerful they
are, the harder they are to use. The easier they are to use, the more rigid
and limited they are. Authoring tools take more work than the game itself in
many cases, but the commercial and creative potential is enormous. Just look
what the gaming community has done with Half-Life and Morrowind,
to cite two examples, neither of which is exactly simple to modify. Imagine
what might happen with a more robust set of authoring tools.

Designers need
to be driven less by Moore's Law. Design for today or even yesterday's technology.
Designing for tomorrow's nVidia card or Pentium processor makes the process
of design more difficult and expensive without necessarily solving any creative
problems.

Finally, I would
like to suggest that an alliance between one or more universities and one or
more major game-producing companies to create something like a game developer's
version of XeroxPARC might be exactly what is needed to take the next step forward:
a well-funded institute freed from the tyranny of deadlines and bleeding red
ink, free to think about and tinker with the fundamental ideas underlying games.

Something has to
be done. Computer and video games should be the 21st Century's revolutionary
cultural form. Their creative energies should match their gargantuan revenues.
But as games become bigger business, their imaginative horizons are falling
rapidly. In the end, that will bad for both the business of gaming and the experience
of it.